One of Chi­na’s biggest bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies is hit­ting the ground run­ning in 2021.

Shang­hai Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals broke ground Mon­day on a $1.8 bil­lion, 3.2 mil­lion-square-foot in­dus­tri­al park ded­i­cat­ed to R&D work in the bustling field of cell and gene ther­a­pies as well as man­u­fac­tur­ing ther­a­peu­tic an­ti­bod­ies, the firm said.

The mas­sive site is lo­cat­ed in Pudong New Area’s Zhangjiang area and will see con­struc­tion take place in two phas­es — 1.08 mil­lion square feet for the first, and 2.15 mil­lion square feet for the sec­ond. News of the ground­break­ing and ex­pan­sion project was first re­port­ed by SHINE, a dig­i­tal news out­let of the Shang­hai Dai­ly.

Zuo Min, Shang­hai Phar­ma’s ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor and pres­i­dent, said the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try park will fea­ture both in­no­va­tion-in­cu­ba­tion-ser­vice and in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion plat­forms to help star­tups com­mer­cial­ize lab re­search projects, SHINE re­port­ed.

“The new site could great­ly ex­pe­dite new drug re­search and the com­mer­cial­iza­tion process in Shang­hai, mak­ing the city more at­trac­tive for new re­search projects from home and abroad,” Zuo said.

The in­cu­ba­tion plat­form will cov­er rough­ly 538,000 square feet while an­oth­er 861,000 square feet will be al­lo­cat­ed for an­ti­body man­u­fac­tur­ing fa­cil­i­ties, the com­pa­ny said. The to­tal vol­ume of an­ti­body re­ac­tors is ex­pect­ed to reach 120,000 liters.

Shang­hai Phar­ma’s man­u­fac­tur­ing ca­pac­i­ties cur­rent­ly fo­cus on ther­a­peu­tics in on­col­o­gy, cere­bro­car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­eases, CNS drugs, and im­munol­o­gy, among oth­er ar­eas.

Over the past three years, the com­pa­ny has worked to ex­pand not on­ly in Chi­na, but in the US and Eu­rope as well. In 2018, the com­pa­ny pub­li­cized its in­tent to hunt for Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ing and R&D cor­po­ra­tions that it could part­ner with and ac­quire Chi­na rights from to bol­ster its dis­tri­b­u­tion busi­ness.

As part of those ef­forts, the com­pa­ny opened a fa­cil­i­ty in San Diego in 2018, which has quick­ly launched ef­forts in myr­i­ad on­col­o­gy drug and an­ti­body pro­grams.

Shang­hai’s pipeline in­cludes cirm­tuzum­ab, a mon­o­clon­al an­ti­body drug that tar­gets man­tle cell lym­phoma and chron­ic lym­pho­cyt­ic leukemia, in Phase I/II clin­i­cal tri­als, ac­cord­ing to the con­glom­er­ate’s web­site. It al­so has TK216, a small mol­e­cule seek­ing to tar­get Ew­ing sar­co­mas—which present as pe­di­atric bone and soft tis­sue can­cer— in a Phase I study in pa­tients with re­lapsed or re­frac­to­ry Ew­ing sar­co­mas.

The drug­mak­er is al­so in pre­clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of ROR1 CAR-T, a cell ther­a­py which doesn’t at­tack healthy cell tis­sue but may pro­vide im­mune re­spons­es to can­cer­ous cells in hema­to­log­ic and sol­id tu­mors. The San Diego site is aid­ing its Shang­hai home base with test­ing and de­vel­op­ment of On­corine, or on­colyt­ic virus­es, which pref­er­en­tial­ly in­fect and kill can­cer cells.

It’s not new for Lonza, the Swiss CDMO nearing its quasquicentennial anniversary, to be in the upper echelon of the biotech manufacturing industry.

But 2020 — as it was for many CDMOs — was a special year even by Lonza’s standards. The company inked a deal to produce 1 billion worldwide doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine and tapped pharma vet Pierre-Alain Ruffieux to lead its operations, moves which have allowed Lonza to make a myriad of other deals that will continue to ramp up its global production capacity.

More than five years after Corey Fishman and Michael Dunne dusted sulopenem off Pfizer’s shelves — the second castoff antibiotic they’ve brought out of the pharma giant — and founded Iterum Therapeutics around that single drug, they have lined up a quick shot at approval with priority review from the FDA.

The decision, six months from now, will mark a make-or-break moment for a struggling biotech that has just enough cash to keep the lights on until the third quarter.

Immunocore spent much of 2019 dealing with the fallout of the Neil Woodford scandal, as the former star investor’s fall crashed the biotech’s valuation out of unicorn range. Now it turns out that the company spent 2020 dealing with another internal scandal.

The longtime UK biotech darling disclosed in their IPO filing last week that they had fallen victim to an alleged kickback scheme involving one of their employees. After a whistleblower came forward, they said in their F-1, they spent the summer and spring investigating, finding fraud on the part of an employee and two outside vendors.

Longtime Vertex CEO Jeffrey Leiden is taking on a new role.

Leiden has been appointed chairman of Tmunity’s board of directors, the company announced Monday. The move comes about a year and a half after Leiden announced he’d be stepping down from his position at Vertex.

Vertex saw immense growth under Leiden, leading the company from its exit out of hepatitis C, when cures were moving in, and into cystic fibrosis. The company’s cystic fibrosis triple combo therapy Trikafta is already its best-seller, reaching the distinction just six weeks after launch and recording the strongest first quarter of sales for any drug, per some estimates.